NEWS REVIEW.

FROM THE OFFICE OF 

THE GUILD OF NONCE PROTECTORS-GENERAL.

The more than six hundred members of the Guild of Nonces, Pimps, Slags, Ponces, Sluts, WifeBeaters, Rapists, Copraphiliacs and Child Murderers 

(afilliated to the Her Majesty's Loyal Drunks, Thieves, Extortionists, Blackmailers, Torturers and Warmongers) 

are deeply disappointed that the Crown Prosecution Service has decided to press entirely spurious charges against a most distinguished member of the Guild, the right honourable and noble Lord Graville ChildFucker of TornArse. It is, in our view, a mistake doubled, inasmuch as it is entirely against the traditions of the Guild for one lawyer to prosecute another.  Lord TornArse, QC, was a prominent member of the Bar and of course should be beyond all reproof, as he has been,
 up until now.

The prime minister poses with another criminal,
 this time a serial child sex abuser.

Well, yes, anyone who knows me, knows I'm prepared to give a chap a second chance, and a third, fourth, fifth,  sixth, yeah, right up to twenty-eight, that's the kinda guy I am. Ask Mr Coulson, and Ms Brooks, and Mr Clarkson and Mr  Mitchell and Dr Fox and Mr Hague, anybody, really.


A word, now, from the Chair of the Nonce Protectors-General, the Lord David Boy Steel,

seen here with Sir Cyril Boys Smith. 

Well, quite frankly, speaking as a Liberal. a Social Democrat, a LiberalDemocrat, a Labour and TorySupporting coalitionist, a former Presiding officer of the Tribesmen's parliament
 
 and now WildernessParty member and former leader, I would just say that all Lord Graville TornArse has done to children is what happens to them in most public schools and I cannot see what the fuss is all about. I mean, old men's cocks, childrens  arses,  just a bit of good clean fun.
.

Holocaust?
 I'll give you a holocaust, you little tart, 
right up your arse. 
Janner, the Labour Party and the House of Peers
at their very best.


HOLIDAY OF A LIFETIME.

ChavTrav, the tour operators specialising in offering stupid people cheap but murderously dangerous holidays in madly unstable but sunny  locations has said that it hopes to be back to normal,  very soon, peddling its shit holidays to morons who cannot read the fucking newspaper


 and live with their heads up their arses, 



or, as is now the case, spread over the sands of some African shithole. 

We are confident, said Mr Barry Rodent, CEO of ChavTrav, that our destinations are extremely safe, even though, obviously, I wouldn't go there, myself,  in an armoured fucking car.  What you must realise is that the lives of our customers are so fucking shit that anywhere, anywhere else than where they live, must seem like paradise.
 And let's face it, for these people, Paradise with a Kalashnikov up your arse is better than being in Glasgow or Luton, watching the Jeremy Kyle Show.
 No, no, Arab Spring, ISIL? 
No, they think they're singing groups,
 off the X Factor.

CROWS A-FEASTING

TRACEY MAY AND THE FATMAN.

Quite what this is to do with the home office is a mystery, Swampy Fallon, maybe, he could've gone, all BuftonTufton-indignant, and waved his white-haired, old  cock around, or even Phil Hammond, William Hague's understudy, he could've gone, but the Dancing Queen, she seldom knows what day it is, does she? And she has a presence which would sour milk at a hundred yards, I betcha those flowers wilted as soon as she touched them and all the sand creatures burrowed themselves deeper and deeper; if I wanted someone to extend my sense of loss and condolence to the world, Tracey May'd be about four billionth on the list of candidates. Maybe it was just a crass attempt, by Downing Street, to show Ahmed that here, in the West, we sometimes let women do shit, even though, as in Tracey's case, they do it far worse even than men would do it. Maybe it was just an unmissable opportunity to grab a photo-opportunity from Mayor Johnson.

Tracey, while my ambition gently weeps.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister TopHat is perpetually chairing a meeting of COMA, 
his cabinet of morons and arseholes, 

COMA, 
more poised to nod-off than to strike. 

which convenes as every opportunity for feasting and grandstanding presents itself, as though  they were all undiscovered Winston Churchills.

Double-Oh Dave.

The Man With The Plastic Gun.
 

As things, on every front, spiral out of control, Cameron and the rest persist in re-framing a series of measures and intitiatives and imperatives - all just slogans - the implementation of which will return the entire world to Before-Before; to a world in which the nigger knows his place, and his white superior knows that as long as he votes, once in a while,  for one set of thieving child molesters over another, things will continue to continue, the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate,  hard-working people being given a leg-up onto the Housing Gallows of Usury.  Everything under control.  Now, it's all fucked, all that stuff, employment, savings, stability.

Now, it is a Full Spectrum Of Measures, 



sounds like a Bond movie, doesn't it, 
Full Spectrum of Measures; the British Government, flapping around like a fish out of water, gasping platitudes and soundbites.  

There is, Mr Cameron, no stopping a  suicidal man with an AK 47, unless, of course, everybody else has an AK 47. So just fuck off with your nonsense, may as well piss in your top hat for all the difference you can make to the global fucking madhouse which you and yours have wrought.

No, no, I simply do not accept that when prime minister, 
 Tony and Imelda Blair, invaded Iraq, that the die was cast for a century. 

 

No, as a matter of fact, it is perfectly logical for us to invade a country, put its people, infrastructure and culture  to fire and to the sword,  - yes, yes, I do accept that, until Conservatisn came along, at any rate, Iraq was the very birthplace of   free-market, neo-conservative civilisation, yes, before the Greeks, even before Mrs Thatcher - it is perfectly logical for us to do that and have the recipients of our intervention remain grateful and obedient to us.  

No, no, lessbeclear,  I simply do not accept that Uncle Sambama torturing their asses off has anything to do with the present situation.  

And in any event, as I have said before, without Uncle Sam, even though - as I have since learned from Lord High Executioner Gove -  he wasn't even in the war at that time, we would not have won the Battle of Britain. So in my judgement, if our friends and neighbours choose to wire some innocent, kidnapped people up to the national grid or squirt high pressure jets of water up their jacksies, well, the least we can do is provide the shilling for the meter. Or is it a nickel?

And, actually, it would have seemed mean-spirited of us not to have joined-in, ourselves.





Ahmed,  the late hotel receptionist, 
before and after he met members of 
the Queen's Own Cheshire NancyBoys Regiment.


 No, speaking as an international statesman of some distinction, myself, I can honestly say this sort of thing shouldn't have poisoned relations between the Ragheads and us; I mean, don't they have a sense of humour? 

In any event, whatever the particular circumstances of Ruin may be - global warming, financial meltdown, a plague of immigrants, refugees and numpties; world war three, Ebola, infants driven mad by pornography, systemic obesity and uncontrollable; random  acts of headchopping terror; mutant crops, starvation, drought, earthquake, tsunami,  and superbug plague, whatever it is, inside the charmed circle of COMA, we can fix it. And if we can't fix it, which, obviously, we can't, we can at least say that we can. Make it all go away. There-there, nasty medicine, but it's good for you.

Now, lessbeclear about this, this is not the middle, nor is it the end of the middle, nor even the middle of the middle and it is not the middle of the beginning but if everybody in the world, I mean everybody, the Russians, the French, the Chinese, everybody, the Greeks, the Africans and...., well, whoever the other people are in the world,  and especially Ahmed, if they all pay close attention to whatever it is that my speechwriters in COMA have dreamed-up, today, yes, yes, here it is, A Quantum of Solace, is that it? No? Is it A Fistful Of Dollars?  No, of course it's not, I have it here, it's a Phil Spector  of Cliches. No? Not Phil Spector? He's the murdering record producer? He didn't murder the records? Actually, they were quite brilliant?  No, he just murdered women? .......And then he killed me, da-doo-ron-ron-ron da-doo ron-ron?  Yeah, genius. Right. the Crystals, And Then He Killed Me.  Got that. So what is it? Today's response? Full Spectrum?  Full Spectrum of Cliches? No? Well, what the fuck is it, then?  A. Full. Spectrum. Of. Measures?

Right, we are about to deploy a full spectrum of measures. No, no idea, what it means. But rest assured, there are people who do, people like Lord Foreskinstein,

What is it, with Tories, that they do this shit?
KiddyNewsnight should show this everytime the Fink is on.

and Monsignor Letwin,



they know what it means, they made it up, in the Soundbites Room. And actually, do you know what, it doesn't matter what it means. It sounds good. And that's what soundbites are all about. And, another do you know what, anybody who doesn't sign-up to this Quantum of Measures is not being true to the great values which underpin the values of this country, yes, yes, the ones which we in the Tory party are dismantling, yes,  law for all, freedom of speech, privacy, a fair days work for zero hours pay, a safety net for the poor;  all that rubbish. 

If you really want to get back to Before - as that Ishmael chappie says - Before, you simply have to listen to me.
 
I won't get you there, to Before-Before, because it is a place beyond; we burned all the bridges back to Decency, Whisky Maggie and Johnnie Underpants and Tony'n'Imelda and Gordon Snot and Nick Clegg and me. And you all fanned the flames, or enough of you, anyway.

You can't go back, but we can pretend to go back and just blame the workshy, and the wog when we can't. Regiments of newspaper journalists make a jolly good living peddling this nonsense - if it wasn't for benefits claimants this, or if it wasn't for wogs, that. Fat people, sick people and nignogs, black nignogs and white nignogs, they are all keeping us from going back to Before-Before, only with colour teevee, obviously, and dishwashers and anal sex; if only it wasn't for Other people, we'd all be back there, right now, in Before-Before.

So all you can do is buy-in to, sign-up to  my Fistful of Solace or whatever the fuck nonsense it is. Because the alternative is to start to think that maybe it is us, we, who are the bad guys, and not them, that  the ravening  monster is not Ahmed or Stavros or stanislav but John Bull and his master, Uncle Sambama.

To-morow, my sermon will be on the subject of how a poor man shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless he does the rich man's bidding, for a wage considerably less than he received last year. As it was in the beginning,  is now and ever shall be, world without end. 

Hush, child, feel the warm breeze of the Jihad on your cheek and sleep, 
while you can.

(sings, quietly, from the Warmongers' Lullaby)
 
.....And there's some British travellers, undressed in tourist heaven,
and here's an angry Muslim, with an Ay-Kay forty-seven.


        

JUST ONE OF THOSE THINGS.

My little warm, brown friend, Harris, was bred, or his ancestors, strictly speaking, were bred to kill things, other creatures, to root them out and shake'n'bite them to death. I buy him soft toys from the thrift shops, remove the eyes and buttons and he grrrr-woofs like a good 'un, ripping the dog or monkey or giraffe to pieces, the lock and the pull of his jaws is amazing but an adult would only need to shout at him or smack him and he would cease his killing exercises; a crying baby, however, would only inflame him, the crying and squeaking representing progress on the road to another's dusty death. There are stratagems to ensure baby's safety, brushing his crib with the dog 's own scent is supposed to work but I would be very hesitant about introducing a new-born baby to HarrisWorld. He is a goodboy, Harris, he barks like a mad person but I have never known him bite or nip anyone and he endures all manner of indignity at the hands of mrs ishmael's grandson, who is eight and correspondingly stupid; that is a relationship which  I am happy to police watchfully, a dog bite hurts at any age, however foolish the provocation. An infant, though, he needs better protection than Tony Blair and the parents of the child worried to death a few days ago by the family pet didn't know that, now, the kid is dead and the pet destroyed, funny how the filthsters always say destroyed or put down, put to sleep, none of them having the courage to say The dog was killed. Anyway, this is a horribly mundane and preventable tragedy, full of if-onlys, a mistake, an oversight, carelessness which will lead to a lifetime of aching regret. And what do we do? We arrest one of the victims. Can't arrest a rancid old peer for a lifetime of beasting but we can arrest a stupid and distraught father, former father. Sometimes, I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home.

THE ZEN WOODCUTTER.

I need a gentleman's saw. It's not that I'm a gentleman,  I guess that the name refers to someone who might make small, neat repairs to his backgammon board or Meerschaum pipe, and not a ruffian joiner, hacking at floorboards or door frames for a living. 

In any event, it is  a small backsaw,  having a brass support along its top edge and with very fine teeth,

 it is a lovely, delightful tool, just the job for neat cuts on small stock - dowels and mouldings. I have a couple but they need sharpening and I can't do that, sharpening planes, saws and chisels, may as well be quantum physics. I can sharpen knives better than  anyone who ever lived but I can't do tools. I have a wheeled and angled clamp for running blades over an oilstone, but more often than not I just buy a throwaway chisel from the UKIP shop -  pay a pound, use it for one job and then consign it to  the eventual task of all screwdrivers and chisels, opening paint tins. I have a couple of small block planes which I manage to sharpen, about once a year and an arsenal of electric planers. I really do want, crave, one of those old, really long planes, 

the deadweight and length of which just square boards by magic but I can never afford one and even  the modern equivalents

 
 cost over a hundred pounds;  I have saws, anyway,  that'll square boards and I'll get a planer-thicknesser one of these days so, other than for the aesthetic there's no need for a big hand plane.

I do, though, buy some decent hand tools  and I wanted a nice gentleman's saw.  Google took me to Workshop Heaven and  for a moment turned my life upside-down. Japanese saws and planes and chisels, I never knew they existed, well, I suppose I must have done, but just never thought about it, yet Workshop Heaven was littered with them, glittering, thin  and deadly, as you would expect from SamuraiSword blokes. These were Zen tools, inscrutable,  tools you had to think yourself into, you couldn't just pick 'em up and start sawing stuff.  Not for the first time, I wished I was thirty years younger, that I might have time to learn all this hand-crafting stuff, acquire these tools and live long enough for them to become my friends. Like my New Pincers.

 I have a pair of pincers which I bought when I first became interested in old furniture, over twenty-five years ago and although I have since acquired more pairs, these remain my New Pincers; pass me my New Pincers, dear. You mean these old, grey ones? Yeah, my New Pincers. They were my first considered tool purchase and I still love them. It came late in life, my reverence for tools and what they represent; doesn't matter if it's a spoke shave or a JCB, it is all clever monkey stuff, started with a rock for hammering and then a jawbone with some remaining teeth, for sawing, this pair,  found in a builders' pit, in the garden,

were used in the construction of my house, the stone with a
depression worn into it, from striking the iron, imagine the damage done to joints and cartilege; the technology is the religion, the spirituality of the opposable thumb, and any man says different, I'll hit him with a mallet.

I don't, though,  have enough life left now; not enough time to fill a workshop with Jap blades and ebony smoothing planes. 
C'est la vie, goes to show you never can tell.

But the projects are always with me.  I need to build a shed to replace the one blown-down in January and I will make it from stout wooden boards, nailed and screwed,  pegged and bracketed, tight enough to withstand Armageddon.  I can't do one of those barn-raising projects, like the Amish people do in the Hollywood movies, where all the neighbours congregate, singing and hammering and drinking lemonade, before dozens of them push a huge wall up, at ninety degrees from the ground and then cheerfully clad it with boards sawn from trees felled in the local forest. I will just have to sink some posts in concrete and clad them and figure out how to make a roof, doors and windows; 
the youtube is my shepherd, 
I shall not want. 

With this project in mind, even though I have, in the byre,  a big, de Walt radial arm saw which would, as well as sawing and moulding wood, whip you up an omelette and iron your trousers, I bought a smaller, more portable site saw, a Makita sliding, compound-mitre saw.  I'm not rich or anything but I don't do foreign holidays or football matches or the 'pub or any of the things which lots of men do; mrs ishmael has a sewing-room filled with crazy machines and forests of fabric and I have tools and machines.  She has machines, too, robots which vacuum and wash the floors, beep-beeping their fatigue or irritation.  I barely do clothes, I have a hairtcut once every sixteen years and I can always, anyway,  justify the tools;  my table saw and my radial arm saw work perfectly, after more than  twenty years' service and have saved us a fortune, the price of machined timber is terrifying, so we bought this one,with one of those big, long tables to fix it to, for when we work outside.

 And then, fuck me, on  my birthday, the other day, there came these,

 a selection of Nip saws, with a how-to book

 They are made, people say, of the best steel in the world, wafer thin, terrifyingly sharp and you only have to look at them the wrong way and they shatter.  Unlike Western saws, they cut on the pull stroke, not the push and this one, above, has a cross-cutting edge on one side and a ripping edge on the other.

I have a couple of boards, so big, so nice that I will probably never use them, some stupid bastard'll come along and burn them, when I'm dead,  and I have a sneaking suspicion that these saws will find their way, not into the workshop but onto the wall, as a piece of art, too nice, too perfect to use.

The Samurai sword, for all the ritualised perfection  of its construction and use was no match for the Thompson .45 calibre sub-machine gun.

Similarly, the Makita saw, another Japanese product,  will do, in a split second, what would take the traditional Japanese saw minutes and it will also cut at angles and to depths which are impossible to achieve, for me, at any rate, by hand. It really would be a long, long labour of love, becoming adept in Nip joinery.

Before sandpaper became available in the West, in the  1830s, woodworkers,  as well as using metal scrapers, rubbed at wood, using their bare hands, with sand and grit and coral and pumice  and if you look at early furniture this obviously worked very well but I wouldn't exchange my Makita orbital sander for  a handful of powdered rock, no more than I'd ride a horse to town.

Such, though, is the devil, Pragmatism, talking,  and deep-down, I do wish I could hone blades, wield handtools like a master and even ride a horse to town. Once, many had these and other skills, many knew the names of birds and flowers, could read the weather, knock-up a box or a gate, lay a wall, catch a fish, tend an animal, tie a knot, brew a beer, bake a loaf; now we are utterly alienated from the means of survival and most of us are good for fuck all, save taking pictures of ourselves and gibbering in cyberspace, like fucking monkeys.

Week after next I will be in the hyperbaric chamber, nine-to-twelve, for a month or two, my six weeks' worth of mornings; maybe, as well as improving my healing process, the ten atmospheres will revive my energy and my autodidactism, maybe I will wrestle, after all,  with my inner Samurai. The saws, after use, can still go back on the wall, to be talked about, handled, proof that we are all the same, even though some of  us pull where others push and some have more teeth to the inch.

LA VACHE QUI RIT

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

NORTH COUNTRY BLUES

NORTH COUNTRY BLUES.

I only ever did one manual job, in the Ibstock Brick Yard. 
Dunno what I was doing there, filling-in, maybe, doesn't matter.
The yard was a major employer in the Norman villages of that part of Leicestershire, fathers and sons, nephews and uncles, m'duck, a community, like. 

 Christ, it was fucking murder. I worked as a chucker,  picking-up three freshly-baked bricks between my two bare hands and throwing them to a setter, who caught them deftly  and arranged them in a pile, to be wire-bound, fork-lifted onto a lorry and delivered to building sites and builders' merchants all over the land. 

That was the job, all day, every day.  Some wore bits of inner tube on their hands, fashioned into fingerless gloves, to protect from the impact of ten-thousand bricks a day but most didn't. People did this one job all of their lives.  It was filthy work,  there were no showers and trying to get clean in the bath at home was very difficult, thick layers of red brick dust clinging to the bath, the taps, the floor, my body and my hair. Ibstock Brick and Tile Company, must've built half the country and shortened the lives of tens of thousands of its labourers in the process.

The miners strike of 1984 festers still and when I think of the miners I always remember the chucking of bricks and setting of them; compared to hefting a pick undergound, the brickyard  was a walk in the park, at least we were in the fresh air, didn't have a million tons of shit over our heads, a rotten timber away from being crushed  to death, in the dark; we weren't coughing our lungs out with pneumoconiosis and so, after working in the brickyard, I always wondered why people would be determined to continue with that filthy, mining way of life, scratching coal, underground; I  always was prepared to give the pit closures a fair wind, anything must be better than working down there.

That was just me, though, and what do I know, about trawlermen, scaffolders, coalminers, about those with whom Mr Death's sergeants share the tea-break. Somehow, for the miners, danger had become them and no matter how many tragedies befell the industry its labour force demanded the right to endure even more

There were, there used to be such communities, all over the place, joined-together by hard, dirty, dangerous, badly-paid work and the sensible thought would be - Let us, for fucks sake, get them up in the light, out from the foundry and into newer, cleaner, better, brighter jobs, jobs they might survive into their eighties, as do the rich.  No more  of this pouring of steel, no more of this  welding and riveting  of ships; burn the blue collars, all shall dress in white, all shall  own their homes and top-up their pensions from the wise investments they make on the stock market. 
It is for everyone, after all, gambling.
All shall share in the brave, new world.
  Even if we have to set the police on them. 

In my way,  I sometimes shared mr jgm2's view that these - miners, car-workers, shipwrights - were unruly, troublesome saboteurs, delaying the decent march of Progress,

but only sometimes.

Othertimes, I saw them as noble, more noble, certainly, than he or I, grammarschool boys, like all grammarschool boys since Shakespeare, on the make.   
   

 Even so, I always tried to be a bit realistic, about this Dignity of Labour thing. 
 It is the sort of enconium that Lord Mike Biscuits would confer on people less ruthlessly and contemptibly  spivvish than himself. 

Oh, a fine specimen, the British working man, 
salt of the Earth, he is, when he's not being confused with all this talk of rights and equality and what have you.
 And unrealistic wages. 
I blame the unions.

Always have.

 

I say, do you happen to have a  couple of Garibaldi biscuits, 
with my tea?

And I still do think that the dignity, the comradeship of hard, filthy, dangerous, menial work is exagerrated, not least by people like this,

Sir Billy Bragg, workers' champion, professional folk-singer and unspeakable arsehole.

 

He's an honorary miner, isn't he, Sir Billy, done more for working men, he has, than anyone.  I mean, just imagine how much worse things would have been without Billy the Buffoon and his GodAwful two-chord fucking racket. 

It's OK, in your twenties, singing protest songs but making a career of it is well, just making a career out of other people's shitty lives and scurrying off back to your mansion. Cunt.

Not just Billy Arse, though, he has lots of friends, the working man; today it's Mr McCluskey, the man who, just recently, handed the country to CallHimDave and JunkyGeorge Osborne, and over which we now expect them to give full-rein to their YahBoo Bullingdonism.  Quite how or why Laughing Len was able to install the clown, Miliband - either of them, actually, but Ed, in this case - as political leader of the Labour movement, then - and still, now -  set my eyes to watering.  He must be a Tory, McCluskey, it's the only explanation.

Back then,  the People's Tribune was another Tory, 

                 

  

socialist firebrand, 

Baron Scargill, seen here with and his common-law Mrs.

They fought tooth and nail, Arthur and Nell, like proper Tories, like Neil and Christine Hamilton,  to retain a grace and favour apartment in London, paid for by the now-tiny NUM, in addition to the large cottage they bought for him in Barnsley and in addition to a princely pension. With all the vulgar cheek of his fellow Tories, Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Shouty, Arthur insisted that the apartment in the Barbican be paid for, for the rest of his life, by the 1,200-strong miners union which he led to disaster.
Isn't it great, how so-called socialists do so well, while their own  rank and file get shat upon ?

 

Doesn't matter which brand of socialist leader we refer to.
The Kneecapper and the Nonce.

These two fuckers, for instance, 

grow richer and more pompous by the day.    

Whilst those who died, starving, for the cause,

 well, they're dead, so th'are; fuck 'em. Aye, fuck 'em, 'sme and Marty's left here,  to continue the revolution. And them boys as starved 'emselves to death....

Well, more fools them.

Bobby Sands, MP, starving in his shit-splattered cell in the H-Blocks or some nameless miner crippled by a baton charge;  what are we to make of them? Are they martyrs or fools?

I would like to think the former but the evidence indicates the latter.

After the miners' doomed strike, Scargill and Thatcher lived-on in relative luxury, bloated hypocrites to their dying day, both as  guilty and as wicked as Sin.  Although driven by monstrous vanity, Scargill, economically speaking,  was probably right; a handful of corporate energy oligarchs now extort as much from us as they can and millions live in fuel poverty, me, strictly-speaking, among them.  We live with the unnecessary threat of lights-out, radiators-off unless we pay more and more to grubby carpetbaggers. Centuries' worth of energy lies below our feet and all it needed to be viable was an efficient carbon capture process. Instead, spivs like Tebbit and Lord Biscuits gleefully poured concrete down the mines.  With any luck I'll see them both dead and, if I get the chance, piss on their graves.

  I heard,  on Radio Four, the other day, the news of the report or inquiry by some cover-up artistes into the policing of the Orgreave NUM picketing, thirty years ago.  Too long ago, now, insisted some rotten, gabshite harpie, all the police're retired, nothing to be gained, things're different, now; lessons were learned at the time. 

She was one of those ghastly shrews who are appointed to bodies such as the laughable Independent Police Complaints Cover-Up Service and who have several degrees in NothingTo See Here, Move Along Studies. She was not interested in persuasion or emollience, this crow, it was just a matter of This is what I'm telling you, it doesn't matter what you think, fuck off and shut up.  I guess that many, like her, a nation's impudent bureaucrats, lost their heads to Madame Guillotine, and quite right too.

 "I have therefore concluded that there should not be an IPCC led investigation into police behaviour at Orgreave."

Ms Tubby  Greene, IPCC second-in-command.

And then we  heard from the miners, still aching from their encounter with the nation's finest, that thin blue line which is the only thing protecting us from Complete Decency.

Theirs was a howl of pain, Quite what they, of all people, expected from the IPCC I don't know but its denial clearly wrought very genuine outrage. At least I think it did.

I don't know about you but I am of the unwavering opinion that any official body  with the words Police and Complaints in its title will be as much  use as a hatful of melted snow.  I don't know how long one must live in order to be made aware that the police are beyond the law but in my case it wasn't very long  and I would have thought that any veteran of the miners strike would expect, from govament, only what Ms Tubby Greene 

so charmlessly delivered. She is paid to cover things up and that's what she did. Safe pair of hands is what they call it. The Independent  Police Complaints Commission exists purely to protect the police from scrutiny, discipline and correction.  The idea that the IPCC would open the door to criticism of government's historical, overt politicising of the cops in pursuit of class warfare is risible   

What did the Orgeave complainers expect?

But aggrieved they were; from within and without,these last thirty years,  they had been  battered,  betrayed  and sold down the river,  their expectations - aspirations we would now obediently call them - denied,  their working lives consigned to the scrapheap of vicious, ministerial whim, no glittering prizes, theirs. Gosh, we even paid Chris Huhne £17,500 for having to leave his job and go to jail. None such for some dirty troglodyte.  We were promised, raged one man, now in his sixties, re-training and re-employment and there was nothing.  The police assaulted me, said another, and I got the criminal record and I haven't worked since. Bless him, this is Britain, he should know that when the police attack you, that's what happens, you get charged with attacking them and I grew a bit impatient at this sustained naivety ancien. Another man complained that where once son followed father down t'pit,  his own grandson now spent the days waiting for a call from a firm which had him on a zero-hours contract, a call which rarely came.   Your grandson and many others' grandsons, too, oh, noble, formerly mining savage.

They wanted an enquiry, the former miners,  to match the one grudgingly given to  those bereaved at the Hillsborough football ground massacree, an event shamelessly rehistoried by Chief Constable Slag and his Merry Men and now being unpicked.

It's been bugging me for days, now, the fact that I don't support the miners' demands  but I have been beaten by the police, more than once, and never demanded a public  enquiry, sought public support. And I was on my own, whereas there were hundreds of miners.  The cops are brutal crooks, that's the way it is. 

Get over it.

I don't know if the miners had any solidarity with the Ulster Civil Rights Movement, when the B Special Constabulary was beating people half-to-death but I don't remember any;  I don't think they took to the streets over the death of Blair Peach or countless others, not cracked on the head but actually killed by PC Filth and I am fairly sure that few miners went to the wall in defence of homosexuals bullied and bashed  by officialdom in all its guises.  Why, then,  should I give a fuck about a bunch of miners run-down by horses and smacked around by the Filth?

No, I won't support them, not because I approve of the police smacking people around nor because I approve of their shabby treatment and not because I agree with the closure of the pits because I don't and I certainly do not dispute that savage economic policies such as these, at incalculable cost,  destroy marriages,  fracture families and devastate communities, fostering crime, alienations,  drug and alcohol dependance, vandalism, decay and ruin.

  I won't support them because they want to own her, they want to hug her vileness all to themselves and  Whisky Maggie, you see,  her wickedness and her ruinous works,  they belong  to us all.

There's nothing special about them, the former miners, they   can just fuck off and join the queue of national grievance, it starts somewhere round Glasgow way.

----------------------------------------------------------

 Mining, though, here, in South Africa or South America is a Fool's Game; if you are not killed the odds are that you will be crippled or diseased; and whichever grim fate ensues, your employer will treat you like shit.

Here was the wunderkind, Bob Dylan,  in 1963, narrating in the first person female, the old tale of capitalism's contempt for its labour. The melody is Irish, the observations and the added images probably as old and as universal as mining and money, themselves. 

Come gather 'round friends and I'll tell you a tale

 Of when the red iron pits ran a-plenty 

But the cardboard-filled windows and old men on the benches

 Tell you now that the whole town is empty.

 In the north end of town my own children are grown

 But I was raised on the other

 In the wee hours of youth my mother took sick

 And I was brought up by my brother

 The iron ore poured as the years passed the door.

 The drag lines an' the shovels they was a-humming

 'Till one day my brother failed to come home

 The same as my father before him

 Well, a long winter's wait from the window I watched 

My friends they couldn't have been kinder

 And my schooling was cut as I quit in the spring

 To marry John Thomas, a miner

 Oh, the years passed again, and the giving was good

 With the lunch bucket filled every season 

What with three babies born, the work was cut down

 To a half a day's shift with no reason 

Then the shaft was soon shut, and more work was cut 

And the fire in the air, it felt frozen 

'Till a man come to speak, and he said in one week

 That number eleven was closing.

 They complained in the East, they are paying too high

 They say that your ore ain't worth digging

That it's much cheaper down in the South American towns

 Where the miners work almost for nothing

 So the mining gates locked, and the red iron rotted

 And the room smelled heavy from drinking

 Where the sad, silent song made the hour twice as long

 As I waited for the sun to go sinking

 I lived by the window as he talked to himself

 This silence of tongues it was building

 'Till one morning's wake, the bed it was bare

 And I was left alone with three children

 The summer is gone, the ground's turning cold 

The stores one by one they're all folding 

My children will go as soon as they grow 

Well, there ain't nothing here now to hold them.

THE THINGS THEY SAY.

Campbell, the pornograpers' pornographer;  

real live snuff movies to order.

 

Pontificating on the fallen Dead Kennedy, Oh, sure, we disagreed, said the pig, Campbell, dismissively, about the Iraq thing. But we were the best of pisshead friends. The Iraq thing. And only now that it will never win another does FilthyLabour wonder why it lost the election.

If there is a God of democratic socialism, He will cause a bomb to fall on Campbell's home and roast his children alive; a squad of marines to gangrape his wife, sorry, partner and deliver the pig, himself,  to decades of torture in a foreign land; then  we can all mutter, contemptuously, Oh, that Campbell thing, yeah, water under the bridge.

A HIGHLANDS EVENSONG.

I first heard this - psalmody, they call it - during what they call the kirking of Inverness Council; the new council assembles in the town church, these strange unaccompanied psalms and anthems are sung, prayers are said and the Council marches to the Council House. Somehow, for no reason, we found ourselves invited to the official lunch and a tour of the building; we saw the room where wartime Churchill had convened his only extra-London War Cabinet and ate and drank like lords. But that shivery psalm singing, well, if you ever get the chance. Along with a Captain Beefheart concert at Warwick University; an Easter Sunday Mass more wailed than sung by ancient sopranos in Brittany and being suddenly surrounded, on an Orkney islet, by a Georgian choir, singing the sacred sites of the world, this Highlands psalmody was one of my life's magical musical moments. They will do some such for Kennedy, more than he deserves, less than he needs.

THINGS YOU SELDOM SEE.

 

 Well, said Chardonnay Singh, a survivor of the Alton Towers disaster,     Oi feel loike I bin on an emotional rollercoaster. knowharramean?  

To be honest you dunt expect this sorta thing, not when you'm bringing' the babbies on an obviously dangerous ride, loike what this one is, you expect 'em to be safe, even though it int.  Wotchamean, I 'ave been on a rollercoaster ride?  Is that what one a them is?  D'you know what,  I fawt  an emotional rollercoaster only 'appened to people on  the telly, loike, on Jeremy Kyle.  Can't believe it's happened to me.   

 

I